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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2021

To document

Abstract

In recent decades, a combination of increasing demand and economic globalisation has created a global market for elasmobranch products, especially the highly prized shark fins for Asian markets. Morphological species identification, as well as traditional cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) barcoding of shark fins and other products, become challenging when in a processed state (such as dried or bleached shark fins). Here a mini-barcoding multiplex assay was applied to determine the species of origin in case studies from southern Africa involving confiscated shark fins in different states of processing. This highlights that the illegal shark fin trade in southern Africa to a large extent comprises threatened species. Matching of sequences of the confiscated fins against public databases revealed several threatened species, including the CITES-listed species Carcharodon carcharias, Carcharhinus longimanus, Isurus oxyrinchus, Rhynchobatus djiddensis and Sphyrna lewini. The findings highlight the need for improved trade monitoring, such as to eliminate illegal trade in shark fins, which can in part be achieved through more widespread genetic sampling of internationally traded products. However, a major limitation to DNA barcoding in general lies in the lack of curated voucher specimens available on public databases. To facilitate the application of molecular methods in a more comprehensive evaluation of elasmobranch trade regionally, a concerted effort to create reliable curated sequence data is recommended.

To document

Abstract

The forestry sector is constantly looking for ways for making data-driven decisions and improving efficiency. The application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) allow the users to go beyond looking at simple key performance indicators. Benchmarking is one of the most common tools in business for improving efficiency and competitiveness. This study searched for benchmarking studies in Web of Science until December 2020. It reviewed 56 benchmarking studies in forestry and discusses the potential advantages of using benchmarking in forestry. More than 80% of the studies apply DEA. This review found that almost half of the benchmarking studies in forestry have attempted to estimate the efficiency of forest management organizations at regional scale, mostly being public or state-owned forest districts. A bit more than one-third of the studies have focused on benchmarking forest industries and one-fifth, benchmarking of forest operations. Forest management organizations mainly applied benchmarking for internal comparison and forest industries entirely focused on competitive benchmarking. Surprisingly, in most cases the studies do not necessarily overlap geographically with forest rich countries (e.g., Russian Federation or Brazil). A number of studies address multiple criteria. The future potential for applying automatic data transfer from harvest machines to interactive benchmarking systems are discussed. Finally, the paper discusses the advantages and weaknesses of benchmarking and future research on improving usefulness and usability of benchmarking in forest businesses.